Visualizing Large-Scale Telecommunication Networks and Services

Global telecommunication networks and services are among the enterprises having the highest volumes of real-time data. A voice network may complete more than 250 million calls per day. Each is described by one or more events, yielding a total of tens of gigabytes of data daily. Wireless, Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM), frame relay, Internet Protocol (IP) networks and higher-level services on them also are described by massive data sets, and can present additional problems in reconstructing an end-to-end view of user activity. Understanding this data at full scale is crucial for managing networks and improving their performance and reliability from a customer’s viewpoint. Visualization techniques have become increasingly important to achieving this goal.